Tag Archives: David Cameron

‘Blue on blue: the 10 greatest Tory feuds’, New Statesman, 14 August 2017.

The Conservatives have descended into infighting over Europe, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone – they have been at each other’s throats many times before. The Tory expert Tim Bale provides a guide to the most acrimonious feuds, starting in 1945… … Continue reading

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‘Think you know who will be the next PM? Think again . . . and again’, Times, 11 July 2017

A year ago this week, Theresa May became prime minister. She may not last much longer. Her authority is not so much seeping away as haemorrhaging. Her credibility (and some say her confidence) is shot. Potential successors are being touted … Continue reading

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‘EU referendum: one year on – political parties’, UK in a Changing Europe, 26 June 2017.

As far as the UK’s political parties were concerned, last summer’s EU referendum was a bit like one of those tag-team wrestling matches you see on TV. Although the bout began with everyone thinking they knew who was on which … Continue reading

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‘The Tory party is more useless than nasty’, Prospect, 20 June 2017.

A recently published review seems to sum the Conservative Party’s general election pretty well, no? In fact, the portrait of the … campaign that emerges from these pages is that of a Titanic-like disaster: an epic fail made up of … Continue reading

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‘David Cameron: The moderniser whose bravery stopped fatally short’, New Statesman, 13 September 2016

Few if any British Prime Ministers have been able to rescue their reputations by publishing their memoirs. David Cameron had better hope he proves one of the exceptions to the rule because, right now, he’s in danger of being written … Continue reading

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‘Simply unstoppable or a self-inflicted wound?’, UK in a Changing Europe, 21 June 2016.

Today, we heard the Prime Minister give his final plea on why we should remain in the European Union, but if David Cameron ever truly believed he could stop his party ‘banging on about Europe’ when it finally got back … Continue reading

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‘The Corn Laws analogy is misplaced. There’s no good reason why the Tories should split over Europe’, ConservativeHome, 17 May 2016.

An apocryphal aphorism coined by a firebrand left-wing legend might not be an obvious way to start a discussion about what could happen to the Conservative Party in the wake of the EU Referendum, but Nye Bevan surely had a … Continue reading

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‘David Cameron is not the man to shoot the Conservative Eurosceptic dog’, Telegraph, 10 May 2016

You know the Tory Civil War is back on when the body-snatching starts again in earnest.  A few weeks ago, Winston Churchill’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, the MP for Mid-Sussex, made it plain that he took a dim view of … Continue reading

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‘Why Iain Duncan Smith resignation registers a six on the political Richter Scale’, The Conversation, 20 March 2016.

If there were a Richter Scale of Political Resignations, then prime ministers such as Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and Harold Macmillan would register at the very top – on nine. Big beasts such as Conservative Chancellor Geoffrey Howe and Defence … Continue reading

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‘The bloody history of civil war in the Tory party’, Financial Times, 27 February 2016

That the Conservative party believes as much in the strong state as it does in the free economy has long been both its triumph and its tragedy. Triumph because the combination of the two has often proved electorally unbeatable. Think … Continue reading

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